OLD SOLDIERS LIVED IT UP IN SINFUL PHOEBUS

Just as the shipyard is the big deal in Newport News, so the Veterans' Administration Hospital has long been the chief employer of Phoebus - the feisty little town which became part of Hampton when that city and Elizabeth City County merged in 1952.

In fact, the "old soldiers" domiciled at the VA hospital and its predecessor, the Old Soldiers' Home, gave a distinctive character to Phoebus in the pre-Prohibition days. A wide choice of saloons and bordellos offered daily escape from boredom to many aging veterans. Phoebus was Sin City.

Fifty-two saloons were listed in Phoebus in 1900 by Hill's Directory. Nearby Hampton had 23. Most of them flourished until Virginia inaugurated Prohibition in 1914, four years before the rest of the nation.

The seven-story hospital on Phoebus' waterfront near Hampton University occupies historic ground. There flourished the Algonquin Indian village of Kecoughtan where Capt. John Smith spent Christmas in 1608. And there in 1854 Peninsula Baptists built the Chesapeake Female College, a columned structure whose dome was a landmark for mariners in the Hampton Roads.

Until a century ago, the village around Mill Creek was called Chesapeake City, but after hotel genius Harrison Phoebus made the Hygeia Hotel at Old Point famous in Victorian days, the village was renamed in the 1880s as Phoebus. It was incorporated as a town in 1900 at the height of its gamy days as a happy Valhalla for old soldiers.

The shore from Hampton Creek to Mill Creek, where Phoebus lies, offers a fine view of Hampton Roads and the Norfolk shoreline. Part of it was called Strawberry Banks in early years because the 1607 settlers found wild strawberries there. Several plantations have flourished there in times past, one built by Harrison Phoebus. I believe it was later bought by the Kenyon family and called Roseland Manor.

When Gen. Benjamin Butler assumed command of Fort Monroe after Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, he rented the Chesapeake Female College building as a temporary hospital for Union soldiers. When the war ended in 1865, he petitioned Congress to buy the college and its 40 acres as a home for disabled warriors. Three other veterans' homes were to be built in the North. Accordingly, Congress in 1870 established at Kecoughtan the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers and Seamen.

For many years the Soldiers' Home, as it was called, remained a domiciliary institution, whose bored inmates sought occasional excitement by walking to Phoebus and patronizing the saloons. In 1898, soldiers from Fort Monroe engaged in what one Hampton history calls "a bloody brawl" outside one "House of Entertainment." Fort Monroe officers finally quelled the riot, and sent 20 soldiers to the hospital and 75 others to the guardhouse.

The lower Peninsula was aghast in 1899 when a yellow fever epidemic broke out at the Soldiers' Home, presumably infected by returnees from Cuba in the Spanish-American War. Fort Monroe and the Soldiers' Home were strictly quarantined, and most soldiers were moved to Plum Island in New York. Twenty-two soldiers died before the quarantine was lifted several months later.

So great was the Army's need for hospital beds in World War I that it took over the Soldiers' Home again from 1918 to 1920 and used it as a hospital, later returning it to veterans' use. When the Veterans Administration was created by Congress in 1930 to consolidate into one agency all veterans' affairs, the Phoebus institution was renamed Hampton Veterans Administration Medical Center.

In recent years the center has been greatly enlarged and improved. A medical center was built in 1937 and today is a full-fledged hospital, treating illness of many varieties. Understandably, today's emphasis is on scientific care rather than the domiciliary care of earlier years.

Phoebus also has changed greatly since those boozy "Sin City" days. No Veterans Administration patients disport themselves there now. In fact, downtown Phoebus is a tame affair compared with earlier years. A large fish-processing plant occupies a prominent site alongside the old bridge across Mill Creek to Old Point Comfort, but the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway terminus nearby has closed. Once it served travelers from the Great Lakes who came in winter to stay at Harrison Phoebus' Hygeia Hotel and its competitor, the first Chamberlin, now replaced by a namesake.

Residents also regret the passing of the trolley line that used to run from Hampton through Phoebus and across the bridge to Old Point Comfort. From the 1890s until World War II, travelers could ride the street car from Hilton all the way through Newport News, Hampton and Phoebus to Old Point Comfort or Buckroe. Many travelers coming by bay steamer from Washington or Baltimore to Old Point debarked there and boarded the street car.